CSGO - FACEIT announces changes to CS:GO Major Format

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Published on: 21/08/2018

It’s been confirmed by FACEIT that the upcoming Major taking place in London in September will have a new format introduced to the New Challengers and the New Legends stages. The new format is based on a system called Buchholz and its designed to stop losing teams from falling into easier matchups that ultimately get them into the New Champions stage.

Here is everything you need to know about the Buchholz system and the differences it’ll bring to the FACEIT Major

FACEIT Major’s Buchholz system explained

The Buchholz system will be introduced to the 3rd, 4th, and 5th rounds of the Swiss groups in both the New Challengers and New Legends stages.

Buchholz is essentially a system to seed the matchups for a competition. Before Buchholz, teams would be seeded on how many wins and losses they had. For example, if one team had a 2-0 scoreline, they would go up against another team with the same scoreline.

This will still be the case for the FACEIT Major, but the seeding for these individual pools will rank teams based on how hard their journey was to the position. For example, if one team loses two games against other teams that haven’t lost a single match, they’ll be ranked as having a significant challenge.

On the flip side, if another team loses two games to teams that have already lost matches themselves, that particular team will be ranked lower because their opposition wasn’t as challenging.
The end result would be that the first team, who may have gone up against tough competition, wouldn’t be forced to fight for potential elimination against a team that had easy opposition but still lost out.

On top of the new Buchholz system, FACEIT will be making sure all Swiss round 5 matches are best of three. This will give all teams close to elimination a fairer chance to fight for their spot in the next stage.

This new round of best of three matches, along with the Buchholz system, will help to remove randomness from the seeding process.

Because there will be more maps to play in the fifth round, an extra day will be added to the event to cater for this. This will be the case for both the New Challengers stage and the New Legends stage.

These additional days do not conflict with the playoffs in any way.

The new schedule for the FACEIT Major has been provided below.

New Challengers Stage – September 5th-9th.

New Legends Stage – September 12th-16th.

New Champions Stage – September 20th-23rd.

FACEIT also announced that the New Challengers Stage and the New Legends stage will take place in the Twickenham Stadium in London, which is the same location the FACEIT Minor events were held in.

The playoffs, which is open to the public, will still be held in the SSE Arena. The venue has a capacity for 10,000 people, so it’ll be interesting to see how many seats are remaining on September 20, if any.

What are your thoughts on the new format changes that FACEIT has announced?